Dr. Ben Carson, who recently attempted to walk back his controversial comments about marriage equality, is scheduled to give the keynote address at a banquet hosted by a notorious anti-gay hate group this fall.

Carson has spent the last several days doing damage control after he compared same-sex relationships to bestiality and pedophilia on Fox News' Hannity, saying "marriage is between a man and a woman ... No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are. They don't get to change the definition."

The comments sparked outrage from Carson's colleagues, prompting him to clarify his remarks and declare to CNN's Wolf Blitzer: "I love gay people."

In October, however, Carson is slated to deliver the keynote address at the notoriously anti-gay Illinois Family Institute's (IFI) Fall Banquet. According to IFI's Facebook page:

IFI is one of the few state anti-gay groups labeled as a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for its extreme views on LGBT people. According to SPLC:

In 2006, then-Executive Director Peter LaBarbera ... told a religious-right gathering hosted by Vision America that homosexuality was "disgusting" and demanded the closing down of all "homosexual establishments." He called for the repeal of all "sexual orientation laws" -- laws that ban discrimination against gays -- and spoke of the "need to find ways to bring back shame to those practicing homosexual behavior."

[...]

In 2009, [Laurie Higgins, IFI's director of school advocacy] compared homosexuality to Nazism, likening the German Evangelical Church's weak response to fascism to the "American church's failure to respond appropriately to the spread of radical, heretical, destructive views of homosexuality." Elsewhere, Higgins has pined for the days when gays were in the closet. "There was something profoundly good for society about the prior stigmatization of homosexual practice... . [W]hen homosexuals were 'in the closet,' (along with fornicators, polyamorists, cross-dressers, and 'transexuals'), they weren't acquiring and raising children."

According to Good As You's Jeremy Hooper, IFI president David Smith has a history of anti-gay remarks, which include:

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CarlosMaza
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Carlos Maza is a Research Fellow and has been at Media Matters since 2011, having previously led the organization's LGBT program. He graduated from Wake Forest University in 2010 with a degree in political science.

On December 7, President-elect Donald Trump named Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Media should take note of Pruitt’s climate science denial, his deep ties to the energy industries he will be charged with regulating, and his long record of opposition to EPA efforts to reduce air and water pollution and combat climate change.

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